My Young Life

by Frederic Tuten

  “Oh,” I said, feeling that I had again disappointed him in the way I had when he learned I did not speak French.

  I lost touch with him after that encounter and learned only recently that he died in 1983 at the age of sixty-seven. He had been married to an art historian and had children. There is no other record of him that I could find.

  Mexican Murals and Exile

  Manhattan, City College Basement Cafeteria, 1954

  The City College cafeteria stretched along the dark basement of Shepard Hall, like the mess halls in black-and-white prison movies. Brown, linoleum-topped, bolted-down tables (in case of a heated political argument?) were lined up on either side; the four tables in the center aisle were known as Red Square, for the various shades of leftist students who, as if it were still the 1930s, argued there on the finer points of Marxist theory.

  I had joined the bohemian table, where I had made friends with English majors and aspiring poets and fiction writers. I was awed by Eli, a senior whose parents—and he, in his free time after school—ran a hole-in-the-wall soda fountain/candy shop in the west Bronx. He wrote with Céline as his model and, to my envy, left school, bused down to Mexico City, and stayed there writing novels and letters to us describing his loneliness. Bruno was a poet in the Dylan Thomas mode and, over coffee, declaimed his sonnets with quivering, dramatic pauses. Natasha, the table’s intellectual and quick-witted deflator of the pretentious—contrary to what I would have expected—adored him. I adored her. But she seemed so sophisticated, so assured in her literary opinions, including about the novels she had read in French and Russian, that I was happy to stay in her shadow and be tolerated.

  I had spent as much time in the cafeteria as in my classes, cutting several to drink coffee and talk. The argument of the moment: Who is the greater writer, Proust or Joyce? I had not yet read Proust, but—following my aesthetic principle that the more difficult, the more abstruse, the better—I argued for Joyce’s greatness. The bohemian table was leftist enough to decry Kapitalism but we were above, we thought, the crude Marxist idea, preached at the tables of Red Square, of art as a tool for revolution. Our heads dwelled in the pure, noble spires of art and ideas, while our feet—as Danny, the defector of Red Square, had said—“dragged in the capitalist muck.”

  Danny was a soft-spoken Mexican. We loved him because he never had dogmatic schemes for changing the world and took our artistic pontifications in stride. He was an engineering student but did not sit with the slide rulers and instead had fixed himself with us at the bohemian table. He was respected for reading to us in Spanish poems by Pablo Neruda but mostly because he was studying something difficult, something practical that one day would get him a job and a place in the world.

  Danny often spoke affectionately of his father, a renowned Mexican artist, and spoke about Mexican painting, about which I knew nothing. One day he brought me a book, Mexican Painting in Our Time, written by Bernard Meyers, a professor at City College. I was immediately smitten by the boldness of the art and by the undercurrent, if not the current, of its political consciousness. I had not known that such art had existed. Danny said that in Mexico, after its great revolution, artists like Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera had devoted themselves to mural painting because they thought that was the best way to show the Mexican people their own history, from the invasion of the conquistadores to their capitalist exploitation in fields and factories.

  This was not easel painting for a gallery or for the homes of rich collectors but art that was meant to be seen on the walls of post offices and school courtyards: art for the masses. Art that would have more meaning to people’s lives than, say, paintings of nude women or bowls of fruit with a wine bottle, or an abstractionist canvas that referred to nothing but itself, the ultimate goal of art for art’s sake.

  The Mexican muralists had the same mission as the religious painters of the past: to instruct, to inspire. The muralists depicted how the Church and the rich, the military and the state, crushed the poor and the powerless. Rivera’s murals, in particular, presented the Mexican people with their history and a glimpse of their earthly socialist salvation in the not-too-distant future. The murals were meant not to unite all classes but to encourage class warfare in the struggle for social and economic democracy.

  The artist, James Joyce believed, should be “like the God of creation . . . invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” I was coming to think there was something dead about this conception of the artist that had made no connection between art and the lifeblood of people who worked and suffered. I saw the artist in combat with all society, with all forms of conformity that would attempt to fit his originality into a conventional mold.

  I loved Joyce’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, who believed only in art for art’s sake. But I also loved Diego Rivera, who had lived in Paris and was a cubist painter before returning to Mexico to subordinate his art in the service of the revolution. Strangely, I found no dichotomy between the individualistic and the subservient vision, believing that both could be combined. Sometimes I wondered about myself and my contradictions and I decided that I was a true aesthetic schizophrenic.

  I was transforming myself from an aesthete to someone who saw no conflict with the idea of art as some form of social mission. The place that had promoted that art was Mexico, its mecca. I wanted to go to Mexico.

  I was in love with the cafeteria. The college was just a place that housed it. I would leave my mother’s apartment early and get there by eight, have breakfast, cheap and good—sausages and scrambled eggs, home fries, rolls with butter, and a mug of coffee for a dollar eighty-seven—and maybe show up for a class or two. I would spend the rest of the day at the table, or go to the library and roam the stacks and then return to the table. I would stay there until late afternoon, and when there was no one I knew left to talk to and the cafeteria was starting to fill up with the evening-class students, I would leave the campus reluctantly for the seemingly never-ending subway ride home. I’d read, and sometimes I was so absorbed that I would miss my stop by several stations. It seemed days before I could return to my real home, the cafeteria.

  I read The Fountainhead for the third time. It convinced me that I was one of the rare Elect, born not to take the conventional route trod by others, the Ordinary Ones, the professors who feared originality, the students who studied, tried hard, got to some uninspired place, and died there. I was like Ayn Rand’s superman genius, Howard Roark, and, like him, I was above churches, law courts, universities—certainly above the petty classroom—so I never needed to study, never needed to write my required papers, never needed, even, to come to class. I knew there were consequences, but I dismissed them and lived on an island of self-certainty and grandiose dreams. I was an artist; what artist writes papers and takes exams? I wrote poems and stories on a black Royal portable typewriter, using a piano bench for a desk. I still had some months left to match or to fly above Rimbaud’s greatness before he quit poetry at nineteen.

  One day, toward the final weeks of the semester, I found in the mail a notice of my academic expulsion. I was to see Professor Barber, the dean of academic affairs. My grades averaged a D. My highest grade was a B– in composition with Professor Schlenoff.

  The dean was full of quirky energy and high-pitched goodwill. “Clearly you’re bright, Mr. Tootin,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be here at City. You scored high on the entrance exam.”

  I finally felt the weight of the expulsion, of my having to leave the college, the cafeteria. I was ashamed. He studied me for a long moment while I held back my tears.

  He saw them welling up and gently said: “Let’s give you another try. Suspension for only a semester. Come back next fall on probation: B average or better. I’m sure you can do even better than that.”

  I thanked him. He must have felt the true gratitude behind it, and he added, “I’ll mail you an official reinstatement for next September. If you have any problems, come by my office when you retu
rn.”

  “I will never forget your kindness,” I said.

  I was too humiliated to tell John or my mother about my suspension. I pretended to be going to school but I was really taking the subway to my job in the Sperry and Hutchinson Company mailroom, where I was again employed full-time. Now, maybe finally, I could save up enough money to go not to Paris but to Mexico.

  Prison Walls and a Memoir

  The Bronx, Parkchester, 1955

  Doubleday had commissioned John Resko to write a book about his prison life; he spent his mornings and afternoons banging on his typewriter and didn’t answer the phone until after five. I visited him and Anita for dinner once a week. He asked about school. I lied, told stories about history and literature classes that I invented. He did not press me but at times, like the murderer Raskolnikov, I yearned to confess. John may have suspected the truth, especially when I had invented two wholly different class schedules, but his mind was filled with his day’s writing and it spilled into his conversation.

  John phoned to ask me to come to his place one evening. He rarely called; it was always I who made contact, who always needed him. I thought it was a good time to tell him about the expulsion, to finally stop the lies and the guilt that came with telling them.

  He opened the door warmly, as always. But I could see he had forced the smile.

  It was only when John was writing his book that I ever saw him gloomy, dark. All those memories, the harshness, the brutality of twenty years of prison life that makes suicide a welcome option to a lifetime of withering, without hope, in a cell, lights off at nine, with roaches and rats and bedbugs for roommates, welled up in him as he wrote.

  We sat silently for some minutes. Then, with his eyes closed, he said, “Sometimes it’s good just to be still and brood. Maybe indulge yourself with a dose of self-pity. Have you ever done that?”

  “Too much,” I said.

  “That’s OK. Just don’t let yourself sink in it for too long or it becomes the whole life.”

  “What’s the matter, John?” I asked, nervous about reversing roles and making a fool of myself in the matters of the grown-up world.

  He nodded to the wall, where, in place of the trash can, were black-and-white drawings of a man sitting in a dark cell; a man being beaten by guards with clubs; the splattered body of a man seen from high up on a prison tier; convicts in a yard warming themselves over a barrel of fire, stone walls reaching to the sky.

  “I couldn’t make those drawings in the joint or I would have been sent to the hole or worse. So I did them recently as an aide-mémoire for my book. Not that I needed much aid.”

  “But you drew a lot in prison. Isn’t that how you got out?”

  “Sure, but I always wanted one day to graduate from drawing to painting in oils on canvas. But prison rules did not permit oils, so that was that.”

  “What were they afraid of?”

  “A secret weapon concealed in the tubes? Or maybe a poison so that the con can commute his own sentence before doing his time? Who knows, Freddy. Prison is its own world, and it makes rules to protect itself.”

  “Did you get them to change the rules or make an exception for you?”

  “That’s a good one, Fred.”

  “I guess I’m naïve.”

  “Let’s say that maybe you’d last fourteen minutes in prison. Make that ten.” He laughed like he loved me.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “Do you know who Lucky Luciano is?”

  “Don’t make fun of me.”

  “I thought you might have mistaken him for a character in a Chandler novel. Anyway, his friends called him Charlie. He asked me to call him that. He was still so powerful, even in prison, that the guards called him Mr. Luciano. Both of us grew up in the Lower East Side, so we were like paisanos, and we chewed the rag over the old places we remembered, like a barbershop that sold French postcards and weed. Anyway, he liked me and my drawings—I think I may have made a few of him.

  “One day he said, ‘Kid, you should be doing oils, like you want.’ I told him that the prison regulations forbade it and I thought that was that. But a few weeks later two guards rolled in a trolley with three huge boxes to my cell. Boxes packed with brushes and large tubes of oil paint and rolls and rolls of canvas. Turpentine, even.

  “The hack says, ‘Present from Mr. Luciano.’ Luciano could have anything he wanted sent to him. He was a star. Even the worst hacks were grudgingly respectful.

  “I went to thank Charlie. He said, ‘Johnny, everyone should work with good tools.’ ”

  “That’s a great story, John. Will it be in your book?”

  “Maybe, but I have to be careful not to irritate my parole board. They could send me back if they wanted.”

  That idea frightened me. That he’d go back to hell. That I would be alone again.

  Months later he called to say the book was finished and had been accepted by his editor. John said proudly, “The copy editor remarked that there was almost no work to be done: perfect spelling and punctuation.” The book was called Reprieve, and it soon would take John on a road to a new life.7

  * * *

  7JOHN’S LIFE IN L.A.

  John Resko (1911–1991)

  Reprieve was published in 1956 to critical success, but was not enough of a commercial hit to make John rich, or to allow him to move to Manhattan, or to sweep Anita away from her job behind the sales counter. But his personal story was unusual enough to get him invited, in 1957, to the popular quiz show The $64,000 Question. The city streets were silent when the show went on: If you had a TV, you were home watching. The contestants were given questions of escalating difficulty; you could stop at any stage and take home your earnings, and if you answered them all, week by week, you’d reach the highest rung, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

  I went to a neighbor’s house to see the show. John was charming and calm, and the famous host, Hal March, seemed to like him. John got as far as the eight-thousand-dollar mark, and his question was on African sculpture. They brought him a mask to identify. He said it was so-and-so from so-and-so. Hal March consulted his card and said, “I’m sorry, that’s wrong.” But John gently insisted that he was right. There was an awkward moment, and March said they had to consult with experts in the field, and that John was to return the following week.

  He did. March said he regretted it, wished it were not so, but John had made a mistake. The audience let out a moan of sympathy. As a consolation prize, he was given a Cadillac. John made a gracious bow, thanked everyone, and was accompanied off the stage. John said, “Freddy, I still think I was right and they were wrong.” It was a little hard for me to believe that, and I think my expression showed it. John laughed. “What do you think, Freddy, isn’t a man entitled to his mistaken beliefs?”

  John sold the Cadillac. “What do I need a car for in the city?” he said. “Anyway, I don’t have a driver’s license and I don’t think I’m ever going to get one.” He didn’t realize then that he was going to leave New York. In the fall of 1957, he and Anita packed up and left for Los Angeles, where he was hired to consult on a prospective Hollywood biopic based on his book. He was also invited to write on spec for the successful TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

  At first he and Anita were not happy in LA. He wrote me: “It’s not smog out here—it’s a rank, fuliginous overcast of opium fumes that makes everything seem pretty and eternal and palm lissome and pastel sweet. I’m afraid Anita has succumbed to the pipe dream and is unable to experience the under layer of stifling, watery shit which is the true foundation of Hollywood—I loathe it and am impatient to return to the world of real people—people who sweat and belch and squeeze pimples and grope each other honestly.”

  But John slowly warmed up to the place. He appreciated the climate. Years in the piercing winter cold and damp and the burning summer heat of Dannemora had injured his health, and he thrived in the reliable sunshine and comforting warmth of Los Angeles. He learned to
drive and got his license, but most of the time, on her days off from work, Anita had to drive him from place to place, which was not many places, since John stayed home most of the time developing scripts and ideas for TV projects and consulting on the script for the movie being made from Reprieve. He bought a get-around-the-town used car, which in the movie world made him a loser. As a writer, he was the lowest person on the totem pole.

  “One look at the car had the guard at the studio gate make a few phone calls before letting me through. I didn’t even get a salute and a good morning smile,” John said, laughing. I didn’t laugh.

  The film, Convicts 4, came out in 1962. It starred Ben Gazzara and bore little resemblance to John’s book. It was heavy-handed, disjunctive, with little cameos of stars like Sammy Davis Jr. to give celebrity glamour to the dark story of prison life. Sammy Davis Jr. played a convict like he was mugging onstage with the Rat Pack in Las Vegas. Ben Gazzara played John Resko like a second-rate Method actor. All in all, the film was a flop.

  John called me from LA: “Have you seen it? What do you think?”

  “It’s terrific,” I said.

  John laughed. “Come out here and be a movie producer, Fred. They can sell you the idea the world is flat and that they’re going to make a movie proving it. It’s not a great film; don’t worry about it.”

  “No kidding, it’s really good. I enjoyed it.”

  “There’s a saying in prison: When you get caught, keep to your story. Did you learn that from me?” His laugh warmed me. I had missed that warmth.

  Then he added something I had always felt but had never heard voiced from him. “Love you, Freddy.”

  In 1968, I was in Los Angeles to write a piece for Arts Magazine about the Art and Technology show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I visited John and Anita in their apartment, the twin of his modest Parkchester flat, except that the African sculptures were missing. He was as cheerful as ever, greeting me with the same warm smile he had the day I first met him. Anita kissed me: “How’s my little Tony Curtis?”